Ellis does a masterful job of making 300 pages feel like 30; there's a page-turning quality to Rebels Wit Attitude that one would not expect from a survey of almost 60 years of rock music. There's nothing dry and boring about the music, and Ellis picks some fascinating and poignant examples showing how the history of rock was filled with subtext and nuance that largely fell on deaf ears. Reactionary parents, censors, and public officials only fueled the fire of greater rebellion and led to artists crafting messages that were either more coded and buried, or even more profane and cacophonous. In the process of making its case, Rebels Wit Attitude manages to touch on almost every band or artist that propelled rock through some of its most significant and enduring (r)evolutions.
The short list of my favorites includes bands like Bikini Kill, Black Flag, Talking Heads, Modern Lovers, The Last Poets, and The Mothers of Invention. Artists like Missy Elliott, Ice T, Jonathan Richman, Frank Zappa, and Madonna are given extended treatments, but never to the extent that they monopolize the narrative. Ellis uses them to illustrate pivotal changes in rock, but stays away from claiming special privileges for any single artist. His vision of pop music is like Ouroboros, the snake that feeds on itself, so there is no clear beginning or end. Is Madonna a kind of modern, Coyote trickster-goddess, or just a tawdry usurper eroding years of Women's Lib activism? Was Ice T making a political statement with "Cop Killer," or just inciting random violence? And what was Little Richard really talking about in "Tutti Frutti?" Ellis answers some of these questions, but doesn't try to unpack elaborate explanations or spend time supposing answers that only the artists really know. He's a tour guide with an agenda, but wisely recognizes that once he draws the dots, smart readers will connect them.
Rebels Wit Attitude does a great job of remaing fair and balanced in its coverage of the many groups making rock music during the last century, but it's impossible to walk so much ground succinctly without leaving a few avenues unexplored. After looking at black music in the '50s, black musicians aren't addressed again with such depth until the '70s (Gil Scott Heron, et al) and again in the '90s, as rap was building up to its current level of cultural prominence. Ellis missed a chance to connect the dots between old and new black music through figures like Miles Davis, with his uneasy marriage of jazz and rock, or through works like Carla Bley's "Escalator Over The Hill" that merged pop musicians like Jack Bruce and Linda Ronstadt with avante-garde performers like Don Cherry and John McLaughlin. Also missing in the book are bands like Los Lobos and artists like Santana that brought strong cultural influences into rock that proved to be highly influential.
As Ellis clearly states in the introduction, the three tests used to qualify an artist for inclusion in the book are right there in the title, and if you don't like it, "go and write your own bloody book!" No collection like this is going to please everyone, but it would be hard to find a better representation of the forces that agitated and coerced rock and pop music throughout the last 60-year period. Ellis also manages to maintain a strongly domestic (US) frame of reference, which is refreshing. At times it can seem like every major rock trend originated across the Atlantic, a point strongly blunted by Rebels Wit Attitude. There's great scholarship here, but the smarts never get in the way of entertaining the reader. The best part is when you finish the book,and start looking up all the artists you haven't heard yet, letting Ellis be your tour guide through his witty, subversive history of rock music.
